Sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

The Irish Rover – Fish n’ Chips

Yesterday it was finally time for Fish n’ Chips again, it’s been way to long but apparently my life came in the way. I should have made this update last night when arriving home, this unfortunately happened to be a little bit late and I was way to “tired” to feel that I could write anything that would make any sense today, so here it is with one days delay (lets just hope that I remember all the important bits);

This week the hunt for the best Fish n’ Chips that Copenhagen has to offer took us to the Irish Pub very suitably called The Irish Rover. Fellow judges this week were the always present Mr Grumpy as well as Da Teacher, the rest of the semi-regulars seemed to be busy with things like vacation and being home sick.

The one thing that happens when you hang out with a teacher, is that, well she is a teacher, spelling mistakes are quickly discovered and pointed out. I do not think that she deducted any points from the food even though the word for fries is misspelled in the Danish menu. Not to worry, for all you non-danish speakers, this Irish Pub do have their menu in english as well, and in that one the word chips is correctly spelled.

Mr Grumpy was of course late as usual, the first thing he does when he finally arrives is to walk inside (yes, these Vikings were sitting outside eating yesterday) buy a beer, come back out sit down and say;

“The beer is bloody expensive!”

After that he says hi, and urges us to order the food even if he is not hungry, since he will not purchase another beer at this bar (for you who wonder, a pint is 50 Danish money). To make him happy, which me and Da Teacher always aim to, we order the food, babble away having a nice time and then got out food. To be honest I do not remember if the food took so long that I wondered if the food would be coming soon. If I didn’t then the food didn’t take to long, if I did, then order before you are hungry enough to want your food straight away.

The fish was today served with chips (not wedges), tartar sauce (or something pretending to be) and peas (de-frosted rather than fresh), and a chunk of lemon. Since the menu didn’t contain this information, Mr Grumpy was kind enough to as, and the fish today was Haddock. He also thought that the biggest chunk of fish should be served to the man, but we all know that in the end it doesn’t matter, since he can eat what we little women do not finish.

Not sure it is a very suitable fish n’ chip fish, since it pretty much crumbled when you started to cut into it. We were lucky that it wasn’t take-away fish as that would have been impossible to eat. The batter was also a sad sight this time, a very thin layer, crunchy but to thin. It also seemed like they forgot to put one part of the fish into the fryer, since the tails had a slightly different color than the rest of the fish.

Mr Grumpy was happy though (guess that is what you call an oxymoron) when identifying vinegar on the table, points of for not being served in a bottle. Who can resist pink little plastic packages of vinegar though? There were also the Tartar sauce, I was under the impression that Tartar sauce was not supposed to be that sour but it was better than no tartare sauce at all.

The chips were not very crispy, and could have done with some more time in the fryer. Not sure this would have helped them as according to Da Teacher, the fryer needed to be changed as the chips got their color from the fryer rather than being fried. Think that she might have to elaborate on that story herself as I did not take notes when she explained how this worked.

All in all, we can determine that this is not the best fish n’ chips in Copenhagen. But it was a nice evening, probably one of the last where the meal can take place outdoors. And the service was good, especially if you compare with a few of the previous places we have been to. For you who missed out on those stories you can find them here and of course there is The Ranking.